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CHINESE FESTIVALS

Chinese Lantern Festival The 15th day of the 1st lunar month is the Chinese Lantern Festival and also the first night of the new year to see a full moon.  The celebration generally consists of displaying many kinds of lighted lanterns though the details variy from city to city. Some friends and I attended the main festival in Shanghai at Cheng Huang Miao (Cheng Huang Temple), which is also the site of the Yu Garden and the huge market.  The temple is in the center of the area, largely enclosed, with lovely traditonal architecture, fish ponds and a 9-corner bridge.  Facing the water there is a tea house that is a charming and peaceful place to have tea and visit with friends. The enclosed area is rather small, and the crowd huge, so navigation is not easy but the shopkeepers are more than happy. Each small side street contains lanterns of a different kind, one of them a large set of numbered lanterns containing riddles; if you can guess the correct answer you can go to the office and collect a prize.  I have a few photos here.

Chinese National Holiday You probably read about or saw on TV the celebrations for China's 60th anniversary.  I watched the parade and other stuff on TV and some of it was really impressive.  It's odd, but the one thing that really stood out for me was the precision of the parade.  I'm attaching one photo of a group of people in the parade (one group out of maybe 100). This is a group of maybe 50 rows of 50 people each, and they are in such perfect lines that it seems it would be impossible, especially when you're walking in a parade. It was difficult to imagine how they could keep such perfect time and all be in unison for such a long distance. It was the same with the vehicles and the military tanks and other parade items. They were all moving at exactly the same speed and were all so perfectly lined up that it seemed they must be physically connected together. A friend of mine said she watched a program about the preparation for this event, and said that Beijing built a practice location for it.  Apparently these people were practicing for 5 to 8 months for this event and that soldiers and others each wore out three pairs of shoes during the practices.  After I heard that, it all made sense.  I'm attaching a photo of one of the groups.  The red flag is composed of cards held up by people marching in the group.  And on occasion, they flip the cards to reveal a new graphic of some kind.  The precision of everything was just astonishing, and really so lovely to watch.

Chinese New Year - Fireworks and Firecrackers I once spent Chinese New Year's with a family at their home near Fudan University.  They live in a compound containng maybe 40 apartment buildings of varying heights, from 8 to 30 stories, interspersed among small walkways, rivulets, gardens.  And at midnight, all the families from all the apartments went outside into the walkways and simulaneously lit all their fireworks and firecrackers. Very quickly it was impossible to hear anything, for the noise.  And soon it was also impossible to see anything, except incessant flashes of light, for all the smoke.  The show lasted for 20 minutes or more, after which the ground was covered with a layer of red firecracker paper 2 or 3 inches thick.  What an experience; Hundreds of fireworks launching at one time, repeatedly for 20 mintues.  And millions of firecrackers exploding at the same time. You may have read that a large, expensive, and almost-finished office building and hotel in downtown Beijing burnt to the ground during the New Year Festival in 2009, credited to phosphorus from fireworks landing on the building roof.  Too bad. It was their own fault; they organised a massive fireworks display without thinking of fire protection on the roof, and disobeyed the policemen who told them not to proceed.  They had firemen and others stationed in all the appropriate places, but forgot one. We had no such troubles in Shanghai and, for another successive year, I bought armloads of the stuff and created my own light show right outside my apartment building.  Long strings of 10,000 firecrackers each, boxes of firework rockets (25 per box) and assorted other stuff. The firecrackers are great.  The fuses are all twisted together in double rows like two long cartridge belts laid side by side.  You light one end and the whole works detonates within maybe two minutes.  We lit several of these simultaneously and you have never heard so much noise or seen so much smoke in your life. The fireworks come in a cubic-shaped box with tubes standing vertically and the rockets inside, all wired together.  There is one fuse on the outside of the container; you light that and it does the rest by itself, igniting one rocket every few seconds.  The boxes can have from 25 to 100 rockets, depending on how much money you want to spend and how large a display you want.  The larger boxes have larger tubes, bigger rockets that go higher and have a bigger bang and light display. And after we exhausted our arsenal I asked the security guard if he wanted to give me a broom to sweep up the two-inch thick carpet of firecracker mess on the ground. And he said, "No, we'll clean it up in the morning".  I love this country. I grew up with firecrackers.  We could buy them freely when I was a child and I have so many pleasant memories of these.  The law changed when I was 14 or 15 and I was so sorry they were banned. But they aren't banned here.  My second childhood. Ahhhh.  Noise, light, explosions, confusion, cordite, the smell of gunpowder, things that go 'Boom' in the night. And people ask me what I want for Christmas.

Shanghai City & Area Photos I have included all my Shanghai City photos in this Section, but they are forming an increasingly large collection and I have created a separate set of web pages for them. This Section includes many Chinese New Year photos, street views, various museums, Shanghai's Movie City and much more. You can access the Shanghai Photo Section here.